The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 12: The Present and Beyond

Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.

Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.

This week's installment takes us into the future, when cars drive themselves, we find out we're not alone and healthcare finally works.

We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.

The Discovery of Earth's Twin (Science)

It’s somewhere out there. The perfect planet. A world the same size, shape, distance, and composition as our own: Earth’s twin. Astronomers don’t know exactly when they’ll find it but chances are very good that it’ll be in the coming years. And it’s even more likely that they won’t just find one world like this, but instead hundreds.

NASA currently has the Kepler space telescope in orbit around the sun. Its mission is to discover strange new worlds and, even more importantly, determine the percentage of stars in our galaxy that could potentially host life. That is, the number of stars that have planets with the conditions that we know are conducive to developing organisms. This means they are about the same size as Earth and orbit at the right distance to have liquid water on their surface. Scientists don’t think that these are the only circumstances under which life arises, simply the only ones that we have an example where they do.

Hopefully, sometime before the end of the decade either Kepler or some other planet-hunting telescope will peer out and spot a solar system around a sun-like star that looks like our own. Orbiting within it in a period of around 300 days will be a tiny, rocky planet that looks very familiar. It will still be a very long time before we can determine whether or not such a world has life. But at least we’ll be able to gaze up and know that, out in the universe, there is some place like home.

Image: NASA

Autonomous Cars (Transportation)

The transportation universe in the next decade won't look much different from today, save for some innovative vehicle designs, more reliance on alternative powertrains, automation on the roads and in the skies, and the continued commoditization of getting travelers from point A to B.

Widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles won't take place until deep into the 2020s, but pulling disparate active safety systems together will create something close to a car that drives itself – if just at low speeds. The aerospace industry will likely be much the same, relying even more on autopilot systems for even short distance flights. And while high-speed rail and mass public transport has been promised for the better part of a century, without the infrastructure, political backing and – most importantly – cash to make it work, we'll continue to rely on dedicated passenger vehicles to get us around ... for now.

Image: U.S. DOT

Wearable Technology (Gadgets)

The future is wearable.

As processors and components grow ever smaller, and cheaper, we’ll put our gadgets on our wrists, at our fingertips and right before our very eyes. Our watches, our eyeglasses and even our clothes will be embedded with enough sensors and processors to make even the slimmest smartphone seem clunky and inconvenient.

Google is embracing the trend with its prototype Google Glass project, a pair of glasses that provides hands-free and augmented reality access to what today we access on a smartphone or tablet. Just a tap at your temple, and you can snap a picture. What was that funny video you saw on YouTube? Pull it up and watch it in front of your retinas. Ask for directions aloud, and the path is laid virtually in front of you.

A variety of companies including Nike and Jawbone are taking a wrist-worn approach to mobile computing, using accelerometers, gyroscopes and other chips (along with a sizeable amount of waterproofing) to track your daily activities and sync with mobile devices. These guys are only going to get smarter and more capable over the coming years, taking on more functions like voice-control and call handling, so that smartphone becomes less and less important to your mobile communication and data needs. Even Apple is rumored to get in on the trend with a Bluetooth watch.

Once purely the object of sci-fi fantasies, this stuff is being developed today, and we could start having usable versions of this technology as the decade progresses.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Growing the Visual Funnel

Over the next decade, we’re looking forward to a few nascent camera technologies becoming realized. A few of them, such as eye-controlled focus and shutter (like the Iris camera above), will erode the hardware interface of taking photos down to its minimum components – just focus on what you want to photograph with your own eye, and blink.

Others will allow us to see our reality in more detail than ever before, and we’re not just talking about super-high resolution. Ever faster image-capture techniques will allow us to dissect light in upward of one-trillionth-of-a-second increments, leading to unknown discoveries.

New breakthroughs in quantum physics will allow us to take images from around corners. A technology that, if the past is any precedent, will likely trickle down from military applications to your smartphone faster than anyone is comfortable with. That comfort level will be nuked by satellites’ ability to identify and track you as soon as you step out of your house. Almost every cool advancement in camera technology has disturbing implications for privacy and surveillance.

A camera is essentially a funnel of visual information onto a recording medium, and eventually that funnel will expand exponentially. The limit it approaches is not a version of our own human vision, but a different kind of seeing entirely. Its event horizon will likely merge with those of other technology fields, resulting in, if not the Singularity, a dramatic change in how we perceive reality.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. A 3-D video camera on a smartphone would be pretty cool.

Wide-Area Surveillance (War)

Drones revolutionized warfare in the 2000s, with cameras that could spy on a few city blocks at a time. Now imagine what drones will do in the 2010s when they get sensors that can keep watch over an the area the size of a small city.

The Pentagon calls it wide-area surveillance, and a sensor called Argus (seen above) or "Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System" is a notable example. Its 92 5-megapixel cameras can monitor up to 10 times more ground — at double the resolution — than conventional sensors used by the military's Predator-style drones. Its name is also eerily appropriate, referencing the mythical ancient Greek giant Argus Panoptes with his 100 all-seeing eyes.

In addition, there's another system called "Vigilant Stare," which is being marketed by developer Sierra Nevada Corporation for domestic use. The Department of Homeland Security has also tested out a 200-megapixel camera system called the "Kestrel" along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The problem is handling all the data. For one, the systems produce ridiculous amounts of it. The cameras on Argus can pull in 6 petabytes of data per day, or 6 quadrillion bytes. It's the equivalent of nearly 80 years of high-definition video, which the Pentagon simply does not have enough people to sort through. Another Pentagon camera project with the nightmarish name "Gorgon Stare" ran into problems after it began pulling in more data than there was available bandwidth, creating lots of latency.

This might partly be solved with algorithms that can automate some of the spying, or a kind of visual-intelligence system that lets the computer figure out what's important, and what's not. But the military better hurry, because its cameras are only getting more advanced, and its data is only growing even larger.

Image: Darpa

DesignARs (Design)

In the latter part of the 20th century, and the first part of the 21st, technology and the internet have helped proliferate new design tools. Much of what used to be designed in the real world — via drafting sheets and handmade prototypes — has moved online. It’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. It’s faster and cheaper to create in virtual 3-D space, but it’s not always possible to tell exactly how something will interact in the real world.

3-D printing has compensated for this problem a bit, offering an easy way to create models, but in the coming decades, augmented reality will further offset it. Design tools will increasingly use feature augmented reality overlays, placing your creation in its intended environment and making it fit with its surroundings.

It’s not enough to show a picture. Augmented-reality tools will be able to incorporate the design elements of existing items, via cached data from the files used to create those items in the first place. For example, if you want to make a case for a phone, software will lay your design over an existing phone, evaluate what it is, and access cached information from that phone’s design. The result: a hybridization of physical and digital design.

Video: 13th Lab

Everything Converges Into Your Pocket

Videogame development, and the business around it, is moving so quickly that it’s impossible to pin down what the big stories of the next decade will be. But right now, the story is convergence devices; whether it’s an iPhone or an Android tablet or who knows what, a device in your pocket or by your nightstand is rapidly becoming able to replace dozens of different things you used to have to own, and for many people that includes a portable gaming system. As tablets get more powerful, the likelihood that alternative devices like this will obviate the need for dedicated game consoles becomes greater and greater. And the open nature of these platforms lets indie developers play in the same pool as the big boys, leading to an explosion of creative new content. Game creators might be freaking out about whether they’ll survive in the great unknown, but for players, this decade will be the best one ever.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

Internet Memes (Entertainment)

As the 2010s get under way, internet memes are taking over the mainstream. From Mitt Romney gaffing about "binders full of women" to President Barack Obama goofing with McKayla Maroney, cultural riffs and ideas are spreading at a rapid-fire pace never before possible.

It's only going to accelerate, for better and for worse. It's one thing for viral videos to jump from YouTube to Hollywood (think Gangnam Style: The Movie), but it's more ominous when internet memes jump from Twitter and Facebook to setting the agenda for actual news coverage. We now have the tools to take sound bite journalism to the next level. Will the next president hire a Minister of Memes? We might get to the point where we long for the innocence of LOLcats.

Kim Dotcom (Security)

On Jan. 19, 2012, Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site, was shuttered and its executives indicted by the Justice Department in what the authorities said was 'among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States."

Seven individuals — including Megaupload founder Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom — connected to the Hong Kong-based site were indicted on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

As the future approaches, we anticipate that Dotcom goes on to become a billionaire with the founding of his new Mega file-sharing service. He beats the rap on U.S. criminal copyright infringement charges because the authorities were never able to extradite him from New Zealand, where he was arrested.

He later goes on to become one of New Zealand's highest-ranking politicians, but is removed from office after it was discovered he was watching porn 24/7 on government computers.

Oscar Pistorius and Prosthetic Athletics (Sports)

The runners awaiting the handoff at this summer's 4x400-meter Olympic relay semifinal much the same — long and lean and exquisitely sculpted bodies. They looked like the classic runners of yore. All except for Oscar Pistorius. Standing there atop his carbon fiber prosthetic blades, Pistorius looked like the future.

Pistorius was the first double amputee to compete in the Olympic Games, and though he wasn't the first, or even second or third, disabled athlete to compete in the Games, he arguably was the most noteworthy. His results — a semifinal appearance in the 400 meters and an eighth-place finish with South Africa's 4x400 relay team — were a footnote to the larger story of whether his prosthetic legs gave him an unfair advantage over other runners. One side claimed his springy Flex-Foot Cheetahs and lighter legs made him able to reposition his limbs faster, while the other side countered that Pistorius was held back by the prostheses' less efficient means of returning energy with each stride.

But Pistorius' Olympic appearance proved one thing: We're nearing the time where prostheses can precisely mimic biologic function, and we'll have to figure out what that means for athletic competition. For now, we have the Olympic Games and the Paralympics — which had their own share of standout performances — but we may soon see the day when "disabled" athletes compete alongside their able-bodied colleagues.

“Fifty years from now, we may not have [the Olympics and Paralympics]," Andy Miah, a chair in Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, told us during the Games. "We may have only one set of performances that people compete in, that reveal how capable they are at using their bodies in combination with technology. When I tune into the Olympics 50 years from now, I not only expect to see different kinds of sports [than we have today], but you never know — I may even be competing there.”

Photo: AP/Emilio Morenatti

The Pluto Switch

This past February, a mystery computing device appeared at a warehouse on the edge of Iowa. Clearly, it was a network switch — a device that moves information between computers — but it was unlike any network switch available on the open market. Even the ports where you plug in the cables were different.

As it turns out, the device belonged to Google — or at least, that's the word from two men who laid their hands on the thing. The device is still shrouded in a fair amounts of mystery, but it's a symbol for the way the computing world is changing. In building the world's largest online empire, Google found it could no longer rely on traditional computing hardware from the likes of Cisco, HP, Dell, and IBM, and it starting building its own stuff, including servers and networking switches.

These devices were designed to save power and cost, but they also aimed to significantly simplify data-center hardware. In the Google world, the complexity is moved into the software.

In the coming years, we'll see the rest of the computing world more in this same direction. In fact, it's already moving in that same direction. The age of the all-powerful, super-expensive hardware device is over, and we're moving into an age where software is king. In the future, the entire web will run more like Google.

Images: networking-forum.com

Healthcare Is Technology's Next Big Fix – At Least It Better Be (Business)

For a lot of good (and bad) reasons, healthcare has been an industry that hasn't benefited much from Moore's Law, and all the goodness that technology brings. With the healthcare industry showing signs of straining to the point of breaking, millions more people coming into the system under President Obama's healthcare reform, and regulations that require it, healthcare's resistance to technology (the kind that is more computer science than biological science) is finally yielding.

Everything from the quantified-self movement and all those health-monitoring gizmos we'll be wearing, to chatting with doctors on our iPads and cheap genetic screening, will become commonplace in the decade to come. And it will happen thanks to a wave of entrepreneurs who see the problems that technology can fix in a $2.6 trillion industry, and the opportunities this mess presents. The propeller heads at McKinsey estimate that in the U.S. alone there is a $300 billion productivity opportunity in health care if we find ways to improve quality and lower costs. And that's just the U.S.

We're not talking about curing cancer, though that would be fantastic. It's the simple blocking and tackling that technology does so well, amassing data, looking for patterns and coming up with better answers to better health.

Since 2007, Wired.com’s This Day In Tech blog has reflected on important and entertaining events in the history of science and innovation, pursuing them chronologically for each day of the year. Hundreds of these essays have now been collected into a trivia book, Mad Science: Einstein’s Fridge, Dewar’s Flask, Mach’s Speed and 362 Other Inventions and Discoveries that Made Our World. It goes on sale Nov. 13, and is available for pre-order today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online book stores.

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